Top 1337 Quotes & Sayings by Gilbert K. Chesterton
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English writer Gilbert K. Chesterton.
Last updated on November 21, 2024.
We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.
Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.
The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
The simplification of anything is always sensational.
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.
Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.
A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.
A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.
Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer's day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented.
Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.
There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
A stiff apology is a second insult... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.
I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.
The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.
A yawn is a silent shout.
The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.
There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.
Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.
White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.
If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.
The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.
The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.
People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.
One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.
'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'
The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.
The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.
Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.
Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.
Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.
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